Various mechanisms exist for deploying cloud computing services. Cloud computing is network, typically Internet-based, computing, where shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices on-demand. Industry trend and vision of one pioneer in the field of cloud computing may be found on the Internet at URL www*intel*com/Assets/PDF/whitepaper/cloud_vision.pdf, in the White Paper: “Intel's Vision of the Ongoing Shift to Cloud Computing,” published in 2010, where periods are replaced by asterisks to avoid unintentional hyperlinks.
However, one of the challenges that limits the adoption of a “public” cloud is the lack of ability to monitor the health of the services provided by the cloud. Today, cloud customers need to rely entirely on the service level agreement (SLA) made with the provider. These SLAs are often insufficient for some customer tiers (e.g., enterprise IT) who need to have a certain level of visibility into how the cloud service is provisioned and maintained. This transparency is important for the purposes of compliance auditing, contingency under service interruption, for instance, Denial of Service (DoS), storing sensitive information on foreign servers, performance compliance with an SLA, etc. This lack of transparency and monitoring information also provides a challenge for cloud service providers because it is difficult to provide such monitoring function to individual customers while providing services in a multi-tenant fashion. Furthermore, enterprise IT ventures may need to subscribe to different services from different cloud providers to fulfill one business function (e.g., supply chain). The ability to monitor the overall health of the enterprise process would be extremely helpful yet almost impossible today.